Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Olga Khazan calls it the Great Liberal Depression. Her
phrase is well chosen. After all, seeing American liberals melt down over
Donald Trump is surprising and horrifying. The denizens of the therapy culture
were unequipped and unprepared for Trump-- even though the Clinton campaign wanted to run against him. They do not even know that making a spectacle of their anguish
does not advance their cause.

All of that therapy has not been doing them very much good. It
has left them emotionally vulnerable, lacking even the personal tools to deal
with an election did not turn out as they had wished.

Khazan has interviewed a number of liberal anti-Trumpers and senses that they are not just crippled by despair at
having lost the election, but that they no longer recognize their country.
They feel as though they lost their country.

I think it more accurate to say that they have been living
in a magical kingdom where everyone thinks as they think and feels as they feel.
All of a sudden they were confronted with the fact that their world was largely
unreal. They were living a dream or living in a bubble. Suddenly, it vanished
and they suffered a rude awakening.

Khazan reports the clinical data:

It’s
now months later, and[Genevieve] Caffrey, like many others,
still feels “overwhelmed with despair.” Her feelings are familiar to many
liberals, to whom political news resembles a multi-car pileup that it’s
impossible to look away from. (I found Caffrey and other Trump opponents
through my extended online network.)

Even
months after the election, these Trump opponents report feeling chronically sad
and unrelentingly angry, signaling a major shift in the mental state of a
substantial portion of the country. About half
of Americans tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump, but for some,
the “disapproval” borders on clinical depression.

A mixture of chronic sadness and unrelenting anger… is not a
good combination. It does suggest that those who are suffering from such
despair are disconnected from reality. Adjusting feels like one sell-out too
many. Fighting feels futile.

Khazan tries to compare this reaction to the conservative
and Republican reactions to the election of Barack Obama. Yet, no one who was
sentient in 2008 will confuse the two. Republicans were not happy that Obama
had won; they were sorely disappointed in the campaign run by the inept John
McCain… but they did not wallow in the slough of despond. They organized the
Tea Party and went to work to win future elections.

Khazan draws the inaccurate comparison:

It’s
easy to mock reactions like these, but for liberals and conservatives alike,
losing at the polls can produce an all-encompassing sense of despair.
Conservatives experienced something similar after the election of Obama, whose
socially liberal platform was anathema, for example, to many religious people.

Is it all about Trump’s outsized personality? Surely, it is
not because he is more right-wing than previous Republicans. He is not. Yet, Khazan
is correct to see that some of the antagonism has to do with ideology.

A bias based on ideology, on belief, is surely more toxic
than any other. You can know what people do but you cannot really know exactly
what they think. Thus, you will become increasingly infuriated that you can
never know what they think. Of course, Trump is one of the least ideological
conservatives since Eisenhower. To his detractors this means that he is a
stealth ideologue of the worst kind.

In Khazan’s words:

Still,
Trump’s outlandish personality has heightened the ideological animus Democrats
would have felt toward any Republican president. Antagonism toward George W.
Bush was severe, but this feels, well, different. A gym in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, had to ban cable news from its TVs after “several locker room and
gym disputes over politics and news turned so heated that some members feared
for their safety,” as McClatchy
reported.

Remember the old days when therapy was supposed to help you
to get in touch with reality. Nowadays it helps you to live in an alternative
reality where your dreams always come true. Freud called it wish fulfillment.
Khazan calls it wishful thinking:

Some of
the Trump-anguish manifests as wishful thinking. Social media brims with
impeachment fantasies, and there’s an entire website devoted to an alternate
reality in which Hillary won. Some people unplug: In Bend, Oregon, Mark Green
has had to stop talking about the news at home, finding it makes him unable to
“shut up about how we're all doomed.” They start to question normal life
events: Emily Michaels, who is pregnant, said she feels morally conflicted
about bringing another child into the world. Caffrey, meanwhile, has taken a
proactive approach: She watches PBS Newshour, programmed her representatives’
phone numbers as “favorites” in her phone, and tracks her progress with the
calling system 5calls.org.

Khazan concludes that it’s all about patriotism. I concur.
Yet, she errs in thinking that liberals are freaking out because they are proud
of a country they no longer recognize. One hears in her analysis an echo of the
appalling statement by Michelle Obama. The first time she felt proud of her
country was when her husband was nominated to run for president.

Patriotism should not be confused with solipsism. To imagine
that Americans accomplished nothing before they nominated an unqualified
politician to the office of the presidency is a flagrant absurdity. It deprives the vast majority of Americans of their pride in their achievements.

Here is Khazan:

Whiplashing
from feeling proud of America to no longer recognizing it—all while still being
an American—can provoke a well-known psychological phenomenon called cognitive
dissonance, or stress from experiencing conflicting beliefs.

She continues:

Several
studies have shown that when two identities—like, say, American nationality and
a liberal worldview—are no longer compatible, it can provoke “neuroticism,
depression, and anxiety.”

What’s
more, pride in one’s nation has been shown to boost happiness
and well-being, according to a study by Tim Reeskens of the Catholic
University in Leuven, Belgium, and Matthew Wright of American University. The
president shapes how citizens and outsiders view a nationality—as liberals who
traveled to Europe during the “freedom fries” era of the Bush administration
can attest. “Great leaders can define the group and even influence the identity
of people who join the group long after they're gone,” said Jay Van Bavel, an
associate professor of psychology at New York University.

In
other words, the Great Liberal Depression is fairly understandable: Trump helps
define what people think of America, and if they feel ashamed of it because of
him, their levels of “subjective well-being” will inevitably decline.

Khazan is correct to note the importance of patriotism. Yet,
she does not recognize that the Obama presidency did not restore American
patriotism. If Obama had promoted patriotism Trump would not have gotten to the
White House riding the slogan: Make America Great Again.

Barack Obama diminished America on the world stage, forfeited
military victory, walked away from international engagement, treated his
opponents like enemies and tried to make America more cosmopolitan by opening
its borders. Obama acted as though he was ashamed of America.

Even today, Trump’s opponents are most anguished about his efforts to close the borders. If they were as patriotic as they think
they are they would know that a nation is defined first by its borders. They
would know that being an American means nothing if anyone from anywhere can
walk across the border and become an American.

Khazan gives the game away when she entitles her article: “Strangers
in Their Own Land.” If there are no borders it is not their own land. If they
do not have the right to decide who enters it is not their own land.

As for patriotism, it is often summarized in a phrase uttered by Admiral
Stephen Decatur, from 1816:

Our
country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the
right; but our country, right or wrong.'

Patriots defend their country in her relations with other
nations. They do not run around the world apologizing for the nation. They do
not declare themselves to be citizens of the world. They do not conduct
themselves as Barack Obama did.

When Decatur added his last phrase, he was saying that our
country is our country regardless of whether it is right or wrong. It should
serve as a definition of patriotism. When you say that your country is not your
country because you believe it to be in the wrong, you are saying that you are
more loyal to your ideology, to your belief in what is right and wrong, than
you are to your country.

Perhaps those who are especially deranged about Trump are
not motivated by patriotism, but by ideological zeal. They resent anyone who
does not believe what they believe.

4 comments:

"Perhaps those who are especially deranged about Trump are not motivated by patriotism, but by ideological zeal. They resent anyone who does not believe what they believe."

I believe you have gotten it exactly and correctly. Your second sentence nails the response of college students and (suspected) paid minions on campuses of late (and for some time). Diversity of opinion will NOT be tolerated.

In Khazan’s words: Still, Trump’s outlandish personality has heightened the ideological animus Democrats would have felt toward any Republican president. Antagonism toward George W. Bush was severe, but this feels, well, different.

I don't know if patriotism is the issue, but certainly it is about pride. There was a pride that believed America was moving in the right direction, towards more inclusiveness, more acceptance, more justice for all. We elected our first black president for the oppressed blacks. We got gay marriage for the oppressed gays. We got bathroom choice for oppressed gender dysphorics. We got health insurance gender and age equality where young males were given the privilege to subsidize healthcare costs for women and the elderly. We got $15/hr minimum (living) wage in many big metro areas where most people made more than $15/hr anyway.

So whether all of this was "virtue signalling" or real progress, it looked like progress, even if identity politics didn't address the issues of the majority. It was the last low-hanging fruit available for progressives to believe in. Of course the ERA amendment was still unachieved, and women still make less than men on average, but that's what Hillary was for. She could finish the job.

Hillary knew how to say all the right things. She knew all the people who can help make things happen, and she was a 40 year political veteran who could deal with Republican majority congress and make deals needed to move things forward.

And then we got Trump, and even Trump was shocked, trusting the polls. Maybe 48% voted for Clinton (and all the polls were projecting), and Trump's 45.9% ended up enough in key midwestern states, and Michael Moore predicted and feared.

So while Trump promised to "Make America Great Again", everyone knew that wasn't his central message. Rather it was just a big fantasy, while he regularly made his true mission clear. It was similar to the tea party message and rejected not just the Democrats, but the Republicans as well. So Trumps' true message was "Let's scare the living daylights out of the 'establishment' on all sides." And when it looks like undeserved people are getting undue attention, while you're doing everything right, and suffering, its easy apparently to say "Things can't get much worse." and roll the dice on Trump, just in case it makes a difference.

I'm sure I don't have to remind anyone how much Trump was hated within his own party, and how he used ad hominem against all his rivals, and they tried their best to defend themselves, but Trump supporters didn't see ad hominem attacks. They saw insiders who had mastered the art of saying one thing and doing another after they were elected.

But it is strange that even Ted Cruz swallowed his pride in the end. He held on all the way through the RNC in failing to endorse Trump, but in the end concluded a maniac Trump was better than Clinton, and so did the rest of the hapless republicans. They sold their souls to the devil, because access to the presidency meant their agenda could finally be enacted.

But whatever hysteria is going on for the Left, it does seem the Right is more in danger, since they're all betting their careers on Trump's sanity, and that still looks like a bad bet. And if it was just Trump's dopiness that threatened us, perhaps the Left would be over-reacting. But Trump's appointing Steve Bannon as advisor looks more sinister, and Republicans are forced to bet on Bannon's goodwill as well, and that seems even more unwarranted.

Republicans have bedded themselves with people whose goal is to destroy the republican party, and remake it into some nationalistic white Christian party. That might be fun if you like chaos, but it looks like political suicide in the bigger picture.

Ares: "Republicans have bedded themselves with people whose goal is to destroy the republican party, and remake it into some nationalistic white Christian party. That might be fun if you like chaos, but it looks like political suicide in the bigger picture."